Walk with Elephants: Explore African Sanctuary on Google Street View

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You don't have to leave home to hang out with one of the world's
most beloved tusked mammals. Thanks to Google, it's now possible
to frolic with elephants in your living room (or anywhere else
your Internet-connected device happens to be).

Save the Elephants, a research and conservation organization
operating in Samburu National Reserve in Kenya, recently teamed
up with Google to help share the story of Africa's imperiled
elephants.

Using truck- and airplane-mounted cameras inside the wildlife
preserve, as well as photos taken by satellites in space, Google
captured images of Samburu's elephant herds doing elephant things
— like splashing in the mud and hanging out in the shade. The
imagery is now available online via Google Street View, the
feature that gives Google Maps users an on-the-ground perspective
of certain places on Earth. [ 7
Amazing Places to Visit with Google Street View ]

More than 1,000 elephants call northern Kenya's Samburu National
Reserve home, and that number is slowly increasing year after
year, said David Daballen, head of field operations at Save the
Elephants' Samburu Camp.
In a recent blog post about the new Samburu Street View
imagery, Daballen said that
approximately 100,000 elephants were killed in Africa between
2010 and 2012 as part of the illegal ivory trade.

But Save the Elephants is doing everything it can to restore
elephant populations to healthy numbers. The organization has
tracked elephants (as well as other animals) in Samburu National
Reserve and elsewhere in Africa since 1998,
using GPS collars to keep tabs on these animals as they roam
around their native habitats.

If researchers notice that a collared animal has stopped moving,
they send out a team to investigate. By tracking Samburu
elephants specifically, researchers can help ensure that herds
don't wander outside the wildlife preserve, where they can fall
victim to hunters and poachers.

"Samburu is an elephant paradise. Thanks to the culture of the
Samburu people, the elephants here are unusually tame and
trusting, and that [has] allowed us to study them more deeply
than almost anywhere else in Africa," Iain Douglas-Hamilton,
founder of Save the Elephants, said
in a statement.

The Samburu people of northern Kenya have many legends and totems
pertaining to the elephant, an animal that they treat with the
utmost respect, according to a short, Google-produced
documentary that accompanied the release of the new elephant
imagery on Google Street View. Users can get a glimpse into the
lives of the Samburu people, the elephants they adore and many
other animal species by checking out the
Samburu National Reserve's Google Street View page.

In the past, Google Street View has brought Internet users closer
to other wonders of the natural world. In June, the company
unveiled imagery from El Capitan, the 3,000-foot-tall (900
meters) granite rock face in Yosemite National Park in
California. Those with a fear of heights can now "climb" the
famous rock formation without getting off the couch.

Like the new Samburu elephant initiative, other Google Street
View projects have tried to raise awareness about places and
populations under threat. For example, Google Street View lets
Internet users
dive into the world of coral reefs, which are some of the
most endangered ecosystems on the planet. And in 2014, Google
released its imagery of the frozen terrain outside of
Churchill, a town in the Canadian Arctic and the so-called polar
bear capital of the world. That project was a collaboration
between Google and the conservation nonprofit Polar Bears
International.